Saturday, February 13, 2010

I am comforted by your comment yesterday, Angel. My husband wants me to go up and talk to John Lewis’s DVR department anyway – despite the fact that the machine is functioning again. We had a hard disk failure once before. Maybe I will. Meanwhile, the freedom afforded by not having that huge list of things to watch continues to be exhilarating. Interestingly, it remembered a timer I had set before the disaster – to record the second part of Midsomer Murders yesterday afternoon. Which was no use without the first part, swept away in the deluge.

Little to say on the knitting front. I’m nearly done with the longish passage of patterning at the bottom of the second sleeve of the grandson sweater. Then things should start speeding forward again.

Thank you for your comment, Ron – as always. I’m very optimistic about this thing. I like the way the two pieces I’ve finished so far, lying on the sofa beside me, look sometimes like a gent’s sweater, tossed aside. I no longer worry at all about the size – it seems right.

I think one often feels an optimism at this stage which is not always justified by future events.

Tomorrow I will, I reeely will, proceed with putting some pattern into the ear-flap hat, and we can have a picture of that. I thought of using some Grandson Sweater patterning, to link the two objects, but none will fit.

I made progress with my seed order yesterday. I actually bought the current issue of “Gardener’s World” because it has a feature in which famous gardening writers (including the recently deceased John Cushnie) recommend the 100 best vegetable seeds. Almost all turned out to be varieties I use regularly; or varieties of vegetables I wouldn’t bother with; or, worst of all, varieties I have regularly tried and regularly failed with – climbing bean “Cobra”, beetroot “Boltardy”.

Somebody recommended a pink-seeded broad bean from Seeds of Distinction – but the SoD website seems next best to non-existent, without even a form that I can find to order a paper catalogue. So that’s not much use.

In lieu of anything more to say about knitting or vegetables, here is a picture of Thomas-the-Elder standing godfather to his first cousin once removed, his cousin Max’ son or daughter Isaure. When you see Thomas and Max together, they are alarmingly similar, but Max is Belgian. Thomas was struck down by his recurring health problem and couldn’t go to the wedding a couple of years ago – this sort of makes up for it.

I can’t remember, at the moment, the sex of the baby. “Isaure” sort of sounds feminine.

Sweater and baby photo both bode well for the future. And I love the idea of freeing yourself from the burden of the recordings to watch. I recently thought about declaring blog bankruptcy, as I have been too busy to read more than a few select blogs, and start all over again.

Your comment on recordings to watch has inspired me to go clear out all the ones that I have on my DVR- evil thing that it is-- do you own your own machine Jean? Mine came free with my cable TV/internet setup.

Speaking of cleaning, I am languishing at trying to complete a bunch of WIPs. I knew it was getting bad when my boyfriend noted that he had seen me working on "five different things, but never the same thing twice." So maybe I should try to finish something someday, eh?

Jean we have a Humax PVR (DVR0 from John Lewis and we have owned it more more thna 2yrs. Every so often it will freeze up, coincidentally often when we are watching with the subtitles on but also at other times. It has also, on occasion ,failed to stop a timed recording so you get say 16hrs of stuff you do not want! However it does this rarely and we find there is a simple solution: treat it like a stuck computer, which it is, pull out the plug from the socket then put it back in and hey presto it reboots itself and is up and running again. The only things you can loose are it stops a recording if you were recording at that very moment, stuff already recorded stays on it.Try it and see.